Henry Darger " Outsider " Artist & Writer at The Frye Art Museum

Tuesday, 22 August 2006 12:30

SEATTLE, WA - Henry Darger (1892–1973), a self-taught artist and recluse who created and inhabited an imaginary world through extensive writings, paintings and drawings, including the illustrated epic, The Story of the Vivian Girls in what is known as The Realms of the Unreal, gained notoriety when his oeuvre was discovered posthumously.  A selection of these works, from the American Folk Art Museum’s Darger Archive, will be exhibited at the Frye Aug. 19–Oct. 29, 2006.

Henry Darger: Highlights from the American Folk Art Museum includes 20 paintings, drawings and tracings by the artist, source materials—including clippings from newspapers, magazines, comic books, cartoons, children’s books, and coloring books—and Darger’s personal documents and other ephemera.  Also on view is one bound volume of the original typewritten manuscript for the 15,000-page In the Realms of the Unreal, which focuses on a band of girls’ heroic efforts to free enslaved children held captive by an army of adults.

Henry Darger: Highlights from the American Folk Art Museum is curated by Brooke Anderson, director of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum, New York.  This exhibition is organized for the Frye by Chief Curator Robin Held.

Darger’s extensive writings included a six-volume weather journal kept daily for ten years (1957–67), several personal diaries and an autobiography of more than 5,000 pages.  Yet he is best-known for In the Realms of the Unreal , the tale of seven little girls—the Vivian Girls—who set out to rescue abducted children enslaved by the adult Glandelinians.  Begun when Darger was about 19 years old, this story of war and peace and good versus evil loosely parallels many of the events of the American Civil War (1861–65).  In the artist’s version, the enslaved people are white children who often appear unclothed, their vulnerability emphasized by youth, innocence and nakedness.  The children’s nudity also reveals their mixed gender, a compelling aspect of Darger’s imagery that is open to many interpretations.  Though death and destruction are prominent throughout the epic, in the end the Vivian Girls prevail: good triumphs over evil, and the children are freed from their captors.

Darger wrote his story first in longhand, and then typed it (both versions are in the American Folk Art Museum’s collection).  He proceeded to add illustrations, teaching himself drawing, painting and collage techniques in the privacy of his rented room in Chicago.  While Darger elegantly expressed his talent through color, composition, content and sheer scale, he was also a capable and willful draftsman who experimented artistically to attain his desired effect.  To achieve his aesthetic vision, Darger invented techniques involving collage and appropriation from popular media.  Believing he was unable to master freehand human figure drawing, Darger freely and unapologetically commandeered images from other places.  He traced images from magazines, comic books, and other print sources he collected. Darger would also have employees at the corner drugstore photographically reproduce and resize poses taken from popular media sources.  If all else failed, he simply cut and pasted reproductions directly onto his watercolor paintings, creating a collage.

An underpinning to Darger’s vast writings and many paintings may be found in his archive, which includes the full breadth of his source material: his personal collection of books, and clippings from newspapers, magazines, comics, cartoons and coloring books.  These items feature subject matter common to many of Darger’s paintings: girls, clouds, landscapes, plants, weather, war and disasters.  Evidencing his obsessive nature are hundreds of clippings featuring the same subject, often an identical image in many versions and sizes.  The myriad clippings point out how Darger’s paintings reflect American popular culture.  His once mysterious Blengins, for instance, have predecessors in an ice cream advertisement showing a winged troll stirring a vat of cream, and a phallic-winged creature first appeared in the comic strip “Mandrake the Magician.” Darger’s large flowers and palm trees in lovely landscapes echo numerous magazine and newspaper advertisements as well.

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